Giveaways
CHRISTCHURCH is perhaps my favourite city in New Zealand. I regularly visit Christchurch, also known as Ōtautahi or Ōtautahi Christchurch, and blog about it from time to time. It is old and traditional but also constantly changing, thanks in part to earthquake renovations.
In this post, I describe a ride on the Christchurch Tram and some of the city’s latest sights, as well as older ones that have survived the turmoil of the post-earthquake years.
The other things include a visit to the old stone Trinity (Congregational) Church, dating back to 1875, which stands next to the oldest wooden building in Christchurch. Until the 2011 earthquake, or shortly thereafter, the Trinity Church had a tower, but it is gone now.
The Trinity Church and the old wooden building next to it get a mention in ‘Christchurch: Gateway to Antarctica . . . ,’ where I am photographed standing outside.
In today’s post, I go inside, marvel at the wooden ceiling, and discover that the Trinity Church has now been converted into the Church Brew Pub.
Last time I checked, the Church Brew Pub website was offering ‘Super Chook Sunday! Half Roast Chicken with Chips & Gravy for $20.’ I wonder if the old-time Victorian clergy thought of packing them in on Sunday by this method? I doubt it somehow.
When I arrived this time, I stayed at the Drifter Hotel on Lichfield Street, a new, affordable and funky place to stay.
The Drifter is really central to many of the attractions downtown, such as Cathedral Square, which you can see in the following photo from 1888.
A photo which shows, incidentally, that there is nothing new about the cathedral spire getting damaged by earthquakes, though its destruction was more complete in 2011.
The old, Italian-style post office that you can see to the right of the Cathedral in the 1888 photo is still standing. You can see one end of it in the following photo, along with a whole lot of modern buildings that have mostly gone up since the earthquakes.
There is also a mural in that photo, one of many downtown, which add to the attraction of just walking around.
Another historic post office in downtown Christchurch is the 1932 Art Deco one in High Street, which now hosts C1 Espresso, ranked among the best cafés in the world by Lonely Planet.
The Drifter is also handy to the historic, Spanish Mission-style New Regent Street.
To the Riverside Market, of which more below, and the Christchurch Tram.
Also, the amazing, gothic-revival, Arts Centre, formerly the university before it shifted to its present Ilam campus in the suburbs.
I paid NZ $40 a night for a pod at the Drifter. The place was amazing. They had yoga rooms with native bird species, a library, and everything.
You could pay for car parking for NZ $30, but I got free car parking in Latimer St.
The Christchurch Gondola was NZ $42 for one adult, and you could get the gondola, tram, and punting on the Avon for $114.
These can all be easily booked from christchurchattractions.nz. There is a shuttle to the gondola terminus from Cathedral Square, costing NZ $15 return.
Here is a video of my journey on the tram.
The tramway route has been incrementally extended, most recently in 2021 to add the small loop near the bus interchange.
Many people are mystified as to why it is not being used as the basis for a modern tramway system of the kind they have in Melbourne, as it is really popular, even with costly tourist tickets and rattly old trams.
Apart from that, I love wandering about to see the sights and take in the city’s rather European vibe.
I went into Ballantynes and Scorpio Books, both of them classic shops.
All the inner-city flats going up are going to change the nature of the place. Christchurch is now becoming quite intensively built up by New Zealand standards.
A lot of people are buying two-bedroom flats to rent out on Airbnb. They pay about NZ $550 each, which is more expensive than Auckland for the same.
Christchurch is to become our second city, apparently, overtaking Wellington. One good thing is that all the new buildings in Christchurch are earthquake-proof. They have to go as deep as 30 metres when piling the foundations. It’s probably now a better investment than Wellington, which they have to fully earthquake-proof still.
The Arts Centre undertook earthquake strengthening in the 1980s and stayed up, along with the historic boys’ school, Christs College, and a few other places.
They’ve got an earthquake museum called Quake City, in Durham Street.
A hair dryer exhibition in the Hornby Hub shopping centre, with the first one dating back to 1840.
And a lovely new conference centre, Te Pae, which cost NZ $450 million.
There is the new stadium called Te Kaha, which cost NZ $683 million. Clearly, money has been no object when it comes to stadiums and shopping centres.
And the new Margaret Mahy Playground, on the banks of the Avon/Ōtākaro, named after a famous author of childrens’ books.
I saw the Wizard, he is 92 now!
Here’s a video of him on University Challenge (UK) in 1962: he is at the top right, his real name Ian Brackenbury Channell.
And a more recent video.
I went to the Art Centre and had some food, it’s a real foodie paradise, that is for sure!
I wandered around the Arts Centre, which used to be the campus of the local university before it moved to the suburbs. The Arts Centre was built in the 1880s in the style known as Gothic Revival, a very popular style in old-time New Zealand.
Perhaps the founders wanted to make it look as though Christchurch had been there ever since the Middle Ages, as opposed to having been erected on a swampy site just a generation or two before.
So effective was the fake that a French visitor named André Siegfried wrote that Christchurch had already, by 1904, “an ancient air . . . the strange, tranquil and respectable appearance of an old European city.” (I’ve got a reference for this at the end.)
In 1958, New Zealand was visited by Nikolaus Pevsner, the former editor of London’s Architectural Review and a world-renowned expert on gothic architecture, both the original sort and the later Victorian revival. In a transcript of a radio talk published in the New Zealand Listener on 12 December 1958 under the title ‘Towns and Traditions’, Pevsner wrote that
The University [today’s Arts Centre] and the Museum at Christchurch — these are very typical examples of the official architecture of the High Victorian moment in New Zealand. I need not tell you how admirable was the confidence and the ambitiousness to erect such buildings in the sixties and seventies [of the 1800s] in towns still of a tiny size. They are of course Gothic and they are of the local stones of the South Island. Here again Christchurch and Dunedin read as against Wellington and Auckland.
The battered Anglican Cathedral, still being restored and as yet without its spire, is another example of the Gothic revival. Here’s a photo of the cathedral with the statue of city founder John Robert Godley in front. The statue is one of the oldest monuments in New Zealand, cast at Coalbrookdale (England) in 1865 and erected in Christchurch in 1867.
Rebuilding has stopped on the Cathedral for the time being, as they have run short of money, which is sad. However, the Roman Catholic Basilica, which many people rated more highly, was completely demolished: there is a story about this, ‘A Tale of Two Churches,’ in a 2021 issue of North and South magazine.
Next to the cathedral is the wonderful Citizens’ War Memorial, a really classy piece of work, which photographed well on a winter’s day.
It is called the Citizens’ War Memorial because the official city war memorial is actually the Bridge of Remembrance with its impressive gate, unveiled in 1924.
There was a push among ordinary citizens and ex-soldiers for another memorial of a more conventional sort, and the Citizens’ War Memorial, also known as the Soldiers’ War Memorial, was unveiled in 1937.
It has the look of the sort of thing you come across in London. Indeed, according to Heritage New Zealand/Pouhere Taonga,
Chris MacLean and Jock Phillips, in their book on New Zealand war memorials [The Sorrow and the Pride, 1990], have argued that one could make ‘a good case…for it being the finest public monument in the country’
The bronze figures were cast in Britain, and I assumed that they had been designed by some famous British sculptor. But amazingly, they were the work of a local boy named William Trethewey, “a monumental mason by trade ‘supplying angels and carving headstones’.”
Not bad for a monumental mason by trade. In fact, there has always been a lot of talent in Christchurch, a sort of strange surplus of intelligence that is the subject of a recent book called Bloomsbury South. Take, for instance, the fact that one of the students who studied and performed early modern physics experiments at the old university was called Ernest Rutherford.
I also checked out the considerably more over-the-top Arts Centre Memorial Window, in which a line of Kiwi troops aided by Captain Cook is defending a pantheon of British historical heroes, assorted pioneers, a nurse, a wounded soldier, and a Māori, from the World War One-era Germans and their allies, unflatteringly depicted as scarlet sea monsters. Now that’s what I call a memorial window — none of your soppy stuff.
Here is a video, which includes a wander along Cashel Street as well.
The new mid-winter public holiday of Matariki was first officially celebrated on 24 June 2023, and I managed to get some photos of posters advertising this first celebration. Matariki is the Māori name for the constellation known by the Greek name of the Pleiades, which rises in the middle of winter in New Zealand.
Here’s a photo along Worcester Boulevard looking toward Rolleston Avenue and the Canterbury Museum.
I love to wander along the Avon or Ōtākaro, the river that runs through the middle of Christchurch.
There were informational panels about water life, and also about early industries powered by water wheels.
And there are always lots of billboards of happening events!
On a wet Sunday, I took this photo of a pretty red umbrella over a café table, obviously awaiting better days.
The present Christchurch City Art Gallery was opened in 2003. It suffered some damage in the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 and had to be closed for repairs that took until 2015.
Outside the front of the gallery, there is a statue of a bull on top of a piano, by the sculptor Michael Parekowhai, with the curious title of ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
And then there is the equally amazing Te Pae / Christchurch Convention Centre, which I mentioned above and which is also shown in the next few photos. It opened in December 2021.
There are billboards outside Te Pae, which describe the personification of each of the stars of the Matariki cluster.
Here’s another video, which includes the lovely footpath outside Te Pae.
The Christchurch Tram goes past Te Pae, and you can follow it onto Cashel Street.
Next to the Bridge of Remembrance, there is the covered Riverside Market, well worth it as a place to revive yourself on a day like this.
Bacon Bros is on the outer edge of the Riverside Market. There is also another outlet elsewhere in Christchurch.
Here's a video about the Riverside Market:
I cooked my own food at the Drifter, mainly, but did eat out in these places both on past visits and this time.
Another place I saw, which might be interesting to stay at next time, was the Muse Art Hotel.
On an earlier trip, I made my way to Victoria Square, named after Queen Victoria of course, after she died in 1901. Before that, it was known as Market Square or Market Place and was the actual original centre of Christchurch, before the centre of the city shifted to Cathedral Square.
Here we are back in the more traditional Christchurch, but again with a monument to V.R., unveiled in 1903, that is once again well above the average.
The statue was intended to inform future generations about the first fifty or so years of Christchurch and the surrounding Canterbury Settlement, in addition to reminding them about Queen Victoria herself. So, it has panels on the plinth that represent ‘Manufacture’, ‘Education’, ‘Agriculture’ and ‘Pastoralism’, plus a depiction of early settlers arriving at Lyttelton, which you can see in this image along with ‘Manufacture’, and a panel representing soldiers setting off for the South African War of 1899–1902.
It also has a plaque giving details of Queen Victoria’s dates of birth and death, and a roll of honour for the South African War. There is more information about this interesting monument on the website of Heritage New Zealand/Pouhere Taonga.
Of course, these days, Victoria Square is a bit more bicultural as well. A monument called Mana Motuhake, consisting of two symbolic representations of waka or canoes, was unveiled near the Queen Victoria statue in 2019.
It’s also worth visiting the Air Force Museum of New Zealand at Wigram. The following photos show one of their prize exhibits, a Mark XVI Spitfire with the RAF registration TE 288.
Built in May 1945, just a little too late to see action in Europe, TE 288 has a more modern bubble-type canopy rather than the kind they had in the Battle of Britain, clipped wings (an option for later Spitfires that were to be flown at low altitudes), protruding cannon on the wings and a more pointed tail.
But apart from those changes, it otherwise looks a lot like the Spitfires that were flown in the Battle of Britain nearly five years earlier.
In fact, close-ups of TE 288 appear in the famous British 1955 Battle of Britain-era film Reach for the Sky, and another Mark XVI now at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, TE 456, was used for flying scenes.
TE 288 has been painted to look like a third Mk XVI that did see some action, Murray Lind’s ‘Rongotea’. This annoys the purists.
Finally, no trip to Christchurch is complete without a visit to the seaside suburb of New Brighton, where I like to catch up with an old friend in a café called Switch New Brighton.
Here’s an older post, from 2021, called Christchurch: Gateway to Antarctica, rich in heritage, recovering from crises.
(The sentence about “an ancient air” comes from André Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand, E. V. Burns trans., London, G. Bell & Sons Ltd, 1914, p. 253.)
If you liked this post, check out my book about the South Island! It’s available for purchase from available from this website, a-maverick.com.
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